Through Their Eyes

An exploration of self trust

A friend and I met at a coffee shop one evening this week for a writing date. We popped open laptops across from one another and started typing. Before we did, she asked what I was planning to write about. I told her that I was going to work on my Substack essay for the week and gave her a selection of topics that I have in my list of things I’ve noticed. She asked if she could give me one to think about instead.

“Sure!” I said. “What are you thinking?”

Her response, “I want you to explore self trust.”

This had not been on my list, but it was intriguing. I asked her to tell me a bit more. Apparently she views me as someone who trusts herself.

“Wow” I thought, a bit wide-eyed inside. “Do I trust myself?”

I set out to explore.

By itself, this observation was an incredible vote of confidence. I didn’t know that I gave off this vibe, and it made me think about how we perceive ourselves vs. how others see us. It also set me down a path of uncovering when I trust and when I doubt myself. What follows is by no means a comprehensive summary of the topic. There are many nuances and a host of additional situations to ponder. These are my initial thoughts on a concept that fluctuates throughout our lives.

I am currently reading a book called The Brand Gap. The author, Marty Neumeier, posits that a brand isn’t what the company says it is, it’s what others say, it’s how customers, consumers of the brand, describe and feel about it. This is an interesting concept to apply to yourself. When my friend shared her feelings about me, it made me think about Neumeier's point - sometimes others see strengths in us that we don't recognize in ourselves.

I started writing and found myself sifting through core memories to find ones that stood out, those pivotal moments where I have learned how to trust myself. I spent a few minutes reliving these as if I were Harry Potter inside of Dumbledore’s pensive:

• I am twelve years old and traveling alone, navigating airports in Los Angeles and Dallas on the way to visit my friend who has moved across the country.

• I am sixteen and soloing an airplane for the first time. A wave of panic flows through me as I wonder if I can do this.

• I am a first-time college instructor standing in front of my graduate student class. Will what I have prepared for the course resonate?

• I am on a run and, after months of feeling like it wasn’t possible, I knew that I had the strength, preparation and courage to run a personal best in the marathon.

• I am sitting across from my husband in a restaurant where we decide that two kids is right for us. We won’t try for another.

• I pop up in my hotel room, plagued with restlessness and know that it’s time for me to make the leap to a new career.

These moments represent a smattering of things, and as I think through them, they seem to fall into two primary categories: The first has to do with big decisions. These are things like relationships, determining where to live, deciding on a career or choosing to follow a new path in life. The other has to do with the deliberate challenges we take on - competing in races, performing a job, completing a task. If I put my work hat on, the first category deals with more strategic decisions (why & where to go in life) while the other feels more tactical (how and what do I need to do to execute things in life). I realize that I approach self trust in each of these areas a bit differently.

Strategic Life Decisions:

Trusting these big, directional decisions comes when I feel strong alignment between my choice and my values. It feels right. While I may not have been able to fully understand the feeling of rightness early in my life, more recent effort I have put into articulating my personal values and finding my “why” puts language around the feeling. But I have never arrived at these decisions in a vacuum. It is through relationships with others, vulnerable conversations, self reflection and deliberation that I have gained the confidence and clarity I’ve needed to trust that instinct. So, big decisions need to feel right (that’s the alignment piece), and why they feel right comes through the clarity we get when we share ourselves with others.

Tactical Life Decisions:

These “how-am-I-possibly-going-to-do-that” challenges are the ones that feel daunting at first. These are also experiences where we often have time to practice. We gain confidence giving talks or lectures when we acknowledge our knowledge. We train for races. We learn how to fly. These things improve with lots of repetition. In these cases, we can trust our hard work and fall back on concrete knowledge that we can, in fact, fly the plane, run the race, navigate the airport, give the lecture.

While my analysis has some shape and logic, the truth is that no matter how much effort we have put into getting to know ourselves or how much we have practiced for a challenge, self doubt creeps in.

I’ve noticed that my second guessing and self doubt pops up most readily when other things are out of whack.

• Self care: When I am not taking care of myself (exercising, sleeping enough) my confidence wavers. I feel less certain about other things when I am not personally grounded.

• Others: When I start worrying about what others think instead of what I think, I feel self-conscious and lose sight of what feels right. I worry about being judged.

• Time: Late at night I tend to be more negative. I ruminate. If I am trying to make a big decision after 9pm, I should forget about it, go to bed and think on it in the morning.

If doubt creeps in, which it often does, I can run through this checklist to determine what I may need first to get back on track.

So I come back to my original assignment in this exploration of self trust: Do I trust myself?

Ultimately, yes.

But, not always.

And, it depends.

I love that my friend sees this as an element of strength in me, and that she thought enough of me to pose this as a topic for me to investigate. I’ll end with the fact that I feel my self trust has only grown as I have gotten older. I attribute this to deep relationships. Because of the confidence I gain from being vulnerable with others and sharing my true self, I’ve learned that through the lens of others we can learn to trust ourselves. Maybe our personal brand can be shaped (and strengthened) by what others see in us.

I think this is why I love my 40s. I feel that I have hit my stride in life in a different way than when I was young.

I was camping this summer, and over a campfire, a conversation prompted the question, “If you could go back to any age, what would it be?” I pondered this for a while, tempted to offer up an answer somewhere in my 20s and 30s. I was in prime fitness, I was younger, freer in some ways, but I was also less confident. I was less sure of who I was, what I knew and who I wanted to be.

So I said, “I think I’d pick right now.”

As I relive this memory, I think my answer had everything to do with self trust. I feel more “me” than I ever have, and that is satisfying. This doesn’t mean that I don’t still doubt and question loads of things, but I am becoming more comfortable in the gray and learning to trust that my values, my why and my ability to learn will guide me.